Resistance and Solidarity in the Garment Worker Movement, 1909-1911

New Woman / New Worker  

Earlier in the same year, nine months before the ‘Uprising of 20,000’, the Socialist Party of America had organized a ‘Woman's Day’ to bring awareness to the cause of the women’s suffrage, or right to vote, movement on February 28, 1909.

The commemoration day was conceived of largely by Theresa Serber Malkiel, Ukrainian-born activist and the first woman to rise from factory work to leadership in the Socialist party – thus bridging the overlapping yet distinct worlds of the workers’ and suffrage movements. This event ultimately led to the establishment of International Women’s Day (IWD) which is now recognised around the world on March 8 each year.

So how did this now-historical day in February 1909 come to occur? At the turn of the Twentieth Century, during which much of the labor movement picked up momentum, the ‘New Woman’ had emerged as an early American feminist idea that advocated for increased citizenship of women in political, civic, and economic spheres. As industrialization rapidly altered social relations, especially in urban areas, the new idea of woman as “independent” and “individual” gained popularity.

The New Woman ideal also integrated specific notions on domesticity and ‘optimal’ gender and sexuality roles in relation to men. It must be explicitly understood that the ‘New Woman’ was grounded in the broader theory of Social Darwinism, a Victorian-era ideology which dubiously applied principles of biological evolution to social order and centered Western culture and Euro-centric racial ideals as “superior” – problematic systems of thought which persist to this day.

In texts by contemporaneous thinkers at the time, the New Woman was encouraged to enter into the traditionally “masculine” roles of public life: education, political engagement, and work. Author Winnifred Cooley’s section on “Woman's Place in the World's Work” in her book The New Womanhood (1904) demonstrates the mode of thinking at the time. She advocates for modern women in the working world, citing the transformative epochs of technology and nationhood as integral to the eugenic theory of labor and gender equality.

In this text, “individualism” is the final epoch that the modern-day arrives at, and even this cultural value is grounded in evolutionary rhetoric: “In all of these epochs, others have existed, as many types of civilization exists side by side to-day, but all are bound to be weeded out eventually to make room for the highest” (page 50). Therefore, ‘modern’ thoughts on women’s labor equality at the time were often argued through neoliberal and hyper-individualist ideals – reflecting the dominant American hegemonies of the industrial era and, ironically, reinforcing inequality by justifying social hierarchy.

Both domestic duties and a newfound participation in higher education in the affluent classes mobilised much of these ideals. The progressive limits of the ‘New Woman,’ then, was often critiqued by the working-class as standards achievable only through middle-to-upper class privilege.

Nonetheless, women’s greater participation in the workforce and in public life was foundational to this new school of thought. And it was in this political environment that the suffrage movement became a primary cause upon which the ‘New Woman’ was oriented.

While the suffrage movement focused primarily on women’s equal participation in the political establishment, the workers’ movement was gaining enormous momentum adjacent to this – causing a class reckoning that revealed these inherent inequalities.  

On Friendship, Violence, and a Bit of Cash: Proximities to Power in the Fight for Rights

The solidarity cultivated amongst the workers helped to collectively resist the efforts of stakeholders who sought to crush the union organizing of the movement. In the early days, factory employers exploited ethnic tensions between immigrant groups in order to weaken the increasing alliance in the industry.

As workers in one dress shop planned a walk-out in late 1909 to protest pay cuts, the owners tried to crush the threat. However, “when employers realized that their hired thugs who surrounded the shop had failed to intimidate the picketers, members of the Evalenko family visited homes of both Italian and Jewish strikers and attempted to arouse hostility between the two nationality groups. This maneuver only served to increase the strikers' determination to resist” (McCreesh, 132).

In fact, attempts by employers to thwart worker relationships was already well in place before the strike. Prominent union organizer Rose Schneiderman of the WTUL described the nefarious strategies of the factory owners used on a regular basis:

“Two girls will sit side by side for weeks without knowing each other's names. Italians will be placed by the side of Jews, and race antagonism worked on to keep the girls at daggers points, so that there will be created a distinct feeling against any sort of organization or fellow-feeling. A good many girls in this fight have come to know each other's names and to know a sisterly feeling for the first time in their lives” (New York Times, 1909).

While the Strike movement maintained financial and political support from elite women for their cause, class tensions were pervasive. Still, there were substantial benefits gained from the bonds made across class lines in these movements.

Male factory owners tried unsuccessfully to undermine the workers by appealing directly to the Colony Club women to cease financial support of the strike (NYT, 1909). So, while the employers hoped to quell the union cause by relying on common class affiliation with the Colony Club women, the women instead aligned with the workers in a common gender affiliation.

Crucially, the increasing presence of prominent women in the public strikes served as a buffer to the police violence that the protesters had grown accustomed to. As the film American Experience: Triangle Fire discusses, when upper-class women joined the fight alongside workers, the presence of “high society” figures in the pickets actually mitigated the police violence.

Historian Annelise Orleck observed, “if you have someone on the social register walking the picket line, the police...are going to be even more careful about who they club” (Wignot, 2011). Thus the proximity of the working-class strikers to the power leveraged by the elite women added immediate benefits, speaking to the linkages of how the police protected the elite classes and interests of private property owners.

Ultimately, however, it was economic ideologies that caused great conflict in the movement. Capitalist ideals and anti-socialist sentiment caused Anne Morgan, daughter of financier J. P. Morgan, to leave the movement (Wignot, 2011), while the tensions that erupted in 1910 “suggested that individuals in both contingents entered the fray in order to further along their long-term reformist goals, whether socialism or women's rights” (McCreesh, 147).

Despite these notably beneficial alliances, relations that initially formed around gender later fractured over class. The wealthy ‘New Woman’ did not always have a comfortable place amongst the working-class ‘New Woman.’ 

Still, the fight for unionised labor rights sparked by the Uprising of 20,0000 was widely successful. By February 1910, most factory owners had signed union contracts, granting greater protections and pay for the strikers. Yet, some of the larger factories resisted these agreements. One of these was the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, which employed about 500 people and occupied three floors of a building in the heart of Greenwich Village.

Just over a year later, the true gravity of what was at stake in the workers’ struggle for basic rights would be revealed in a horrific way.

Tragedy in Manhatten: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (1911)

At around 4:40pm on March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory experienced a destructive fire that burned the top floors of the building and resulted in 145 deaths; 115 of those were women and teenage girls (Wignot, 2011). People suffocated or were trampled in panicked stampedes. The public watched as young women jumped, chased by flames, to their deaths on the city sidewalks below, and the bodies piled in grisly formations before the public’s eyes. Inside the factory, fire safety measures had not been put in place, and doors were locked from the outside – making it impossible for many of the workers to escape.

A prominent shirtwaist manufacturing factory, the Triangle owners Isaac Harris and Max Blanck were also immigrants who achieved great financial success through the factory; union organizing was an offensive act and direct threat to their personal ownership of private property (American Experience: Triangle Fire, 2011). At a historical moment where high individualism was a core value in the co-proliferation of both industry and national identity – even in ‘New Woman’ politics - the encroaching union movement in the garment industry threatened the owners' personal stability (film citation). When the fire happened, after the owners' sustained refusal to meet Union demands or to sign agreements, the public representation of the dead catalyzed a powerful shift of these politics around workers’ rights.

The New York Times covered the story the day after the fire, on March 26, 1911, and featured large, graphic photographs of the scene; the captions read, “Firemen carrying the body of a woman who jumped from the ninth floor,” and “looking for bodies of the dead” (New York Times [1857-1922]). Next to the lists of identified, reported missing, and unidentified dead persons, the photographs display the event that had fast become a city-wide tragedy.

Rose Schneiderman, who had appealed alongside Clara Lemlich and others at the Colony Club in December 1909, gave a speech in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911:

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers, and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement (‘We Have Found You Wanting’, 1911)

The explicit and grisly visibility of the event pushed public opinion in favor of the cause ignited by the Union strikes two years before; the urgent reality of unsafe conditions and the needs for reform could not be ignored. Between 1911 and 1913, extensive labor reform legislation was passed in New York State, and the American Society of Safety Professionals was established. The movement started by the organised political action of young immigrant women was catapulted to policy change by a major public tragedy.

Works Cited

1. “Critical time for shirtwaist strike.” Historical New York Times [1857-1922]. December 1909. Proquest. Web. 20 March 2012.

2.  Cooley, Winnifred Harper. The New Womnanhood. New York: Broadway Publishing Company. 1904. Print.

3.  “Death lists shows few identified.” Historical New York Times [1857-1922]. March 1911. Proquest. Web. 20 March 2012.

4. “Girl strikers riot; quelled by police.” Historical New York Times [1857-1922]. November 1909. Proquest. Web. 20 March 2012.

5. “Girl strikers tell the rich their woes”. Historical New York Times [1857-1922]. December 1909. Proquest. Web. 20 March 2012. 

6. McCreesh, Carolyn Daniel. Women in the Campaign to Organize Garment Workers, 1880-1917. New York: Garland. 1985. Print.

7. “Triangle Fire.” Directed by Jamila Wignot. Apograph Productions Inc. Film for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. PBS.org. 2011

8. Schneiderman, Rose. ‘We Have Found You Wanting’, testimonial. 2 April 1911, Leon Stein, ed., Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy (New York: Quadrangle/New Times Book Company, 1977), pp. 196-197 - via The Kheel Center